Gravity, of course, is relative. The weight of a thing is meaningless without its pull toward another. This is especially evident at Aucocisco's November exhibition, where multiple thoughtful takes on the theme of gravity bind the works by Gail Spaien and Ahmed Alsoudani.

In Spaien's eight serial watercolors, garlands of flowers — closely resembling daisies — playfully compose patterns and landscapes in untitled 30-by-40-inch frames. With assiduous detail, Spaien has rendered her flowers according to a very personal set of rules. Uniformly, each has 13 petals. Earth-tone hues (blues, yellows, and browns) have been delicately applied, yielding annular stripes, ring-like breaks in coloration that give each flower a vibrant glow. In "Shift #1," a cluster of flowers forms a landscape in the lower half of the frame, lively brown flower heads foreshadowing skeletal blue ones. Mid-frame, the flowers collect into an airy vinous pattern, ascending through the top of the image. In the center of the flower mass, three looms of interwoven florets hover in the foreground, as if propping up the blossom. In "Shift #5," the daisies are disarticulately scattered; this time faint impressions of their florets shadow their bodies.

Daisies are perennial, symbols of a natural, harmonious order, and Spaien has invoked them with palpable energy. Both as discrete pieces and a collective series, her flowers are collected in great, overlapping clusters, buoyant and animated. In another technique, Spaien employs a structural gambit to marvelous effect: her frames are mounted low on the gallery wall, below waist level, lending her work a relationship to heaviness. Though not usually an installation artist, Spaien patterned the walls on her side of the gallery with grids and florets, lending the gallery the stillness of a fossilized arboretum.

Daisies are a keen choice: they are durable, inoffensive flowers with social function (after all, they are the original "he-loves-me, he-loves-me-not" flower). What cannot be ignored, however, is their association with mortality. As Spaien is surely aware, daisies are the most popular floral decorations for grave sites, where they are often found in clusters similar to those seen here. With this lens in mind, Spaien's low-framed arboretum is recast into a sort of spectral mausoleum. The flowers' levity transmits a spiritual tone.

The three charcoal and acrylic paintings by 35-year-old Iraqi refugee Ahmed Alsoudani are explosive, expressionist sites where a multiplicity of forms and figures violently collide. Lately the subject of incredible accolade and attention in contemporary art circles, Alsoudani's tortuous personal narrative is inextricable from his work.

Raised a relatively secularized Shi'a in a predominantly Sunni neighborhood in western Baghdad, Alsoudani fled Iraq at 19 after he was caught painting over a mural of Saddam Hussein. He began painting seriously a year later in Syria. Soon after, he studied painting and English at the Maine College of Art before receiving graduate education at Yale. His success has come with a shadow: Alsoudani has been living in exile and estranged from his family for nearly half his life.

Ravishing beauty The wreckage at the end of Modernist art's main thrust is the starting point for "Pat Steir: Drawing Out of Line," a four-decade retrospective of the New Yorker's drawings at the RISD Museum.

Something borrowed "Bride" stands tall as the leading lady at the Institute of Contemporary Art's current two-woman exhibit "A Meticulous Ferment," a five-tiered pastry of sculpture glittering with as much opulence, self-importance, and fragility as the title might suggest.

Traveling critic seeks art to review In “60 wrd/min art critic,” a performance event that has the feel of a triathlon, Lori Waxman, the Chicago Tribune art reviewer, will be coming to Portland to write short reviews for artists who wish to show her their work and get a piece written about it.

Re-structuring Three large oil paintings overwhelm the lobby at the Portland Museum of Art, introducing the show "Division and Discovery: Recent Works by Frederick Lynch," a beautiful and meditative collection found on the fourth floor of the museum.

Deep blue If you’re going to explore the cosmos, better do it at night.

Tattoo you Dr. Lakra is no more a real doctor than is Dr. Dre or Dr. Demento. The 38-year-old Mexican tattoo artist’s real name is Jerónimo López Ramírez. As for “lakra,” it means “delinquent.” Or so I thought.

Cowboy junkie England in the mid-’80s, gray and depressed by Thatcherism and the Smiths, wasn’t a place folks typically dressed to the nines in ten-gallon hats, bolo ties, and Nudie shirts. But such were the sartorial choices made those days by the members of the Mekons.

Quivering timbers What’s a tree without roots? Usually it’s the kitchen cabinet or a sheaf of inkjet paper, but for Maine artist Jacob Galle, the answer is a lot less complicated.

An expanding world Housed in two galleries at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, “Methods for Modernism: Form and Color in American Art, 1900 to 1925” presents a healthy survey of works by artists featured in the two most definitive venues for introducing European modernism to America.

UNMASKING AFRICAN RELICS | February 26, 2014 An evocative, transportive exhibit of icons, artifacts, and spirit masks from some of the many, many cultures and “kingdoms” of West Africa, what is now Cameroon and Nigeria.

THE TEQUILA ODYSSEY | February 20, 2014 Each of the city’s drinking establishments has its roots in some primordial myth.

TRUE EFFIN' ARTISTRY | February 20, 2014 Mousa is the new recording alias of Vince Nez, a/k/a Aleric Nez, the name by which he released a nimble, unpredictable record in late 2010.

THE STATE OF SEA SALT | February 12, 2014 A surfeit of salt manufacturers have cropped up in the state over the last few years.

NOT YOUR AUNTIE'S DOOM | February 06, 2014 Sure, it may be Latin for “forest of trees,” but Sylvia more readily conjures some wiseacre aunt, not a burly group of veteran musicians trying to carve new notches in well-trod forms of heavy metal.